The Commodore 64 is coming back, in a form that owes a debt to both Nintendo's shrunken Mini SNES and thee Vega+ Sinclair ZX Spectrum reboot.
The due-in-early 2018 “C64 Mini” matches Nintendo's plan to shrink an old machine, in this case by 50 per cent. Like the Mini and the Vega+ the revived Commodore will pack in pre-loaded …

The world's getting a new Amiga for Christmas.
Yes, that Amiga – the seminal Commodore microcomputers that brought mouse-driven GUIs plus slick and speedy graphics to the masses from 1985 to 1996.
The Amiga was beloved by gamers, graphics pros and many an IT aficionado who just appreciated their speedy (for their time) …

Rock deities Radiohead have snuck a program for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum into a re-release of their seminal 1997 album “OK Computer”.
Dubbed “OKNOTOK”, the re-release can be had as £100/US$130/€120 boxed edition that includes three vinyl records, books galore and “a C90 cassette mix tape compiled by us, taken from OK COMPUTER …

Seminal time-sharing OS Multics - the Multiplexed Information and Computing Service - has been resurrected in a new simulator.
As The Register reported in 2011, Multics' sprang from MIT's decision to eschew an IBM mainframe, buy one from GE instead and write an OS for the machine. The operating system's source code was …

Those of you yearning for the experience of running a 1990s-vintage graphics workstation are about to have a good day: a developer named Eric Masson has resurrected the IRIX Interactive Desktop that shipped on Silicon Graphics Workstations and now offers it as a Linux desktop alternative.
Silicon Graphics (SGI) had a crack at …

The classics never die – or so we hope. One classic, Colossal Cave Adventure, is getting a new lease of life on GitLab.
Regarded the first text adventure game, Colossal Cave Adventure was first given life in the 1970s on a Digital PDP-10, by ARPANET pioneer William Crowther, and expanded on by Don Woods, then a Stanford …

An outfit called Arca Noae has released a new version of IBM's venerable OS/2 operating system, named ArcaOS 5.0.
The Register understands that Arca Noae has a licence from IBM to do a distribution of OS/2, the OS that Big Blue pitched against Windows 95 back in the day. OS/2's fourth release was widely regarded as technically …

Warning: there's no real IT angle in a chap hacking a venerable Tektronix Type 422 oscilloscope to play Pong. It's just fun.
The Frankensteinian machine is the brainchild of Glen Kleinschmidt over at the electronic hobbyist site EEVBlog.
There's no “take the easy way” about Kleinschmidt's work: sure, it might be easy to …

Brazilian outfit Tectoy has won the right to manufacture new versions of Sega's 16-bit MegaDrive console and is taking pre-orders for the venerable gaming machines.
Known as the Genesis in some parts of the world, the MegaDrive used cartridges and this reproduction will support that medium. To drag the MegaDrive into the 21st …

Mostly-forgotten silicon-maker Zilog is alive and has just released a new product that shares a little DNA with the Z80 CPU that powered many of the earliest mass-market microcomputers.
The Z80 famously powered Sinclair's iconic ZX 80, ZX 81 and Spectrum computers. The CPU also made it into the Radio Shack TRS-80, the Osborne …

Conference Couture
Welcome to another edition of Conference Couture, in which we relive odd moments of technology history through the branded tat given away at trade shows.
This week, one for the Apple completists.
Back in 1989 Apple was huge in education. But wanted to be huger, by getting university students to buy more Macs. And what better …

German retro enthusiast Jens Schönfeld of Individual Computers is about to start manufacturing new Commodore 64 cases from the classic home computer company's original injection moulds.
His announcement follows a licensing deal with the outfit that now owns Commodore's trademarks, Polabe Holding.
Schönfeld's announcement …

A 30-year-old bug in the iconic Nintendo game Legend of Zelda allows players to finish the game in minutes. A video posted to YouTube shows that, beneath what looks to be a fun game glitch, there is a fascinating bit of code manipulation in 6502 Assembly:
Youtube Video
While executing the procedure requires a tediously …

The Computer History Museum has revealed part of an unpublished memoir by Gary Kildall, a programmer and entrepreneur who made critical contributions to the personal computer industry in its formative years.
Kildall died aged just 52, in 1994, but in his short life he earned fame for developing CP/M, an operating system that …

1982-vintage adventure game The Hobbit has been ported to the Dragon 64, 34 years after the program's release.
The back story: in 1982, The Hobbit was the hottest ticket in gaming, thanks to its addition of big bold graphics and a syntax that did away with adventure games' annoying habit of allowing only a limited set of verbs …

Emails are still trickling in with readers trying to trump the almost nineteen-year-old server we found was just being decommissioned back in January.
A recent missive from reader Ian piqued our interest because it said he's still running a Timex Sinclair 2040 printer bought in 1982!
The 2040's a thermal printer based on the …

An IT lecturer from the Australian state of Queensland wants to revive the very first Unix – the version written by Ken Thompson on a Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-7.
While the PDP-11 is probably the most famous of the series – a genuine watershed in computer history, and a successful system that sold 600,000 units in its …

Blogging site MetaFilter has restored its Gopher server, after 15 years of downtime.
Explain to kids these days that there was a time when the World Wide Web was just one of several competing ways to navigate the internet and they'll stare at you blankly. Tim Berners-Lee gave the world Hypertext Transport Protocol (HTTP) in …